Well...it was still only an Edge. People in North Carolina reportedly got their first look at a real hurricane. Here in the Point of Virginia we got, mostly, rain. Lots and lots and lots of rain. Then the wind finally blew in, first one way and then the other, and as the ground was now soaked, trees went down left and right.
I'm told that the Cat Sanctuary actually had electricity longer than some parts of town had. Some houses down in the valley were dark on the Thursday night. I was online for an hour on Friday morning before all the lights in the neighborhood went off.
Something told me that it wouldn't be worth the trouble to report the power outage on Friday or Saturday. By Monday I ventured out to ask a neighbor whether his family in town had electricity. He confirmed that nobody had. Wires were lying across the road every half-mile or so, trees closer together than that. It wasn't that he, and other neighbors who'd been in town, weren't able to get up my road; it was that on Friday and Saturday they hadn't been able to drive on the roads in town. He had been in the neighborhood on Sunday afternoon and again on Monday afternoon. Trees had been across our private road. I had seen, and broken, a little one that had been growing on my property, so it seemed my responsibility, on the Thursday night. After that, the neighbor wanted me to know, the big trees had gone down across the road. Big oak trees, a couple of them. He had finally got the wood sawn and stacked beside the road before his son-in-law came up to help a little. He is about eighty years old.
He did not say "And some lazy lady writers and Young Grouches of fifty, who might have been out clearing the road for their elders, were nowhere in sight." That is not his style. He liked doing the work, though he felt tired afterward. He wanted his energy and enterprise to be admired. Well...he has a chain saw in his truck. I don't. It took me about half an hour to break up a maple tree about the size of my leg with hand tools--with a little help toward the end. It would have taken me half a day to break a big oak tree, and I would probably have had to break it in more than one place to get it out of the road.
On the Tuesday the cheerful deliveryman delivered Queen Cat Serena's usual 35 pints of Pure Life water. All six cats still enjoy sharing a bottle of water with me, though the weather's not been all that warm. It's about the sharing. A slurp of water still seems to mean as much to the cats as a piece of meat.
Anyway, the deliveryman had a phone. I begged a ride down into town where I could call the electric company. On the way down the hill we saw that the power line where the White-Faced Hornets had built their nest was lying in the flooded creek below; the nest was gone. It had been warm, so maybe the hornets escaped. I hope so. They were the nicest hornet family I ever saw or heard of. Then, below that point, we saw where a big old oak tree had taken a little buckeye and a maple sapling down, and taken a chunk out of the road, making a hole, three or four feet deep, five or six feet long, covering the quarter of the road near the long steep bank. When we got into phone range I told the company they would need to make a detour to get to the power lines, which had snapped under at least three fallen trees.
They said, giving themselves plenty of time (they thought), they expected to have all the lights back on by Thursday night. My lights were on for a few hours on Friday morning; then they went off again until six o'clock on Friday night.
There was, of course, no Internet. I came to McDonald's today. In town I heard that some of the businesses, and a few houses, were connected to the Internet as of today. Most are not. So far I'm not seeing a mob of people inside the restaurant using the Internet. I am seeing a lot of people out in the parking lot in their cars. Nobody's even trying to guess when my privately funded connection on the screen porch will come back online.
Oh well...at least the hurricane also delivered unreasonably mild weather. A few sycamore leaves are just starting to color. Everything else is still green, green, green, and overnight lows have dipped down as low as 55 degrees Fahrenheit. Nobody's had any reason to miss either electric heat or electric air conditioning during the week without electricity. The Kingsport Times-News reported that people evacuated from flood zones in North Carolina were able to enjoy camping at nice nature parks in Tennessee.
It will be interesting to see the comparisons between Hurricanes Helene and Camille, Virginia's Official Standard of Awfulness in Weather. I was in California when Hurricane Camille hit the Swamp and don't remember its awfulness firsthand. I was in a different part of California, later, when primary school children were shown an educational documentary film about the awfulness of Camille. But I've read some estimates that Helene was wetter.
Regular posts will resume when the Internet connection comes back. I have FINALLY been able to open and read, offline, a review copy of a book the publisher tried to send me about a year ago. It's still a good book. I may post the review in two pieces, the Fiscally Conservative Review that jeers at Robert Turner's bad, overpriced, untenable ideas and the Socially Liberal Review that applauds his excellent ideas. Or you could just get ahead of me, read Creating a Culture of Repair yourselves, and tell me what youall think. I think the good ideas outnumber the bad ones and there's an important piece of history in the book, too, that youall probably missed.
One more thought...Here in McDonald's, the manager was complaining that the McHelp aren't supposed to wear long-sleeved T-shirts under their official McDonald's shirts. No jackets, either, unless they are official McDonald's jackets. I observe that the air conditioning in this building is fantastic. If you're sitting down in here on one of those 90-degree, 90-percent-humidity days in summer, in a few hours you could start shivering. The McHelp are supposed to keep moving, and stay close to the heat sources in the kitchen, which helps--but I wouldn't quibble about their undershirts.
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